From: Francis Hwang <sera@...>
Date: 2005-03-04T11:37:09+09:00
Subject: Re: RAA Status & The Problem with Ruby

On Mar 3, 2005, at 12:44 PM, vruz wrote:

>> I was never quite clear on how RPA was supposed to do this. Not to
>> criticize the work of Mauricio and others, but it seemed to me to have
>> a scaling problem: If you have a few volunteers trying to evaluate
>> hundreds of Ruby libs, they're not going to have time to really
>> evaluate them.
>
< snip >

> About the scaling problem, with respect to its developer base,  it has
> the potential of being as scalable as any other open source project.
>
> If you're talking about volunteers' turnaround efficiency, I
> personally remember I found an undeclared dependency in Lafcadio,
> understood the problem, reported it and it was fixed in the
> corresponding RPA package within 24 hs. just to give an example.
> I personally tested dozens of packages in at least 3 platforms.

Yes, I remember that, and I appreciate the work. But while it's one 
thing to say "this code looks documented, and it installs without 
breaking apart", it's another thing to say "this code is document, and 
I use it all the time, and I can tell you from experience that it's 
robust, the API is stable, and the maintainer is available and 
responsive to bug reports." It seems to me like it takes a tremendous 
amount of time to be able to say the second thing. In fact, I'd guess 
that based on the relatively small download counts Lafcadio gets, there 
aren't many people who can say that about my lib. Other than me, of 
course, and I'm sort of biased.

I guess what I'm saying is that when you're getting somebody to do 
research on a library for the sake of a project like RPA, they have to 
be extremely motivated to be able to use it long enough to have a solid 
opinion on it. Whereas if you can find somebody who is actually _using_ 
that library to make their job easier, to work a little easier to put 
food on the table, their opinions will be richer and researched with 
more depth. So maybe initial efforts to reveal what projects are high 
quality could start with that information.

Francis Hwang
http://fhwang.net/